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The second iteration of AMD's sucessful K6 line of processors burst onto the PC scene in the summer of 1998. It boasted a whole host of
new features of its predecessor the K6, and issued a new challenge to the market leader Intel. The K6-2 extended the usefulness of the
Socket 7 platform and marked the most concerted assault upon the home PC market by AMD. The K6-2 built upon the strengths of the K6 and
renewed AMD's challenge to Intel. The fight was on! Introducing the challenger, the AMD K6-2The K6-2 was a significant improvement over the K6 which had started life a year earlier in 1997. It built upon the K6's excellent processing core, with the addition of 21 new instructions called "3D Now!". These are SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) instructions designed to enhance the 3D geometry capability of the chip's floating point unit. This allowed the K6-2 to overcome the handicap of the slow (relative to Intel) CPU which the K6 owned. The K6-2 also saw the introduction of a 100 MHz front side bus. This was only available to owners of new Super Socket 7 motherboards which also included features such as AGP allowing the most powerful graphics cards to be used in systems other than that of the Pentium II. All of these features helped to give the K6-2 performance fast enough to be a credible challenger to the dominant Pentium II. The K6-2 was originally manufactured in speeds of 266 & 300 MHz. The 300 MHz chip saw the introduction of the 100 MHz bus over the conventional 66 MHz bus used by the 266 MHz chip. August 1998 saw the release of a 333 MHz chip on a 95 MHz bus which was quickly followed by a 350 MHz version on the 100 MHz bus. November 1998 saw the release of the 366, 380 and 400 MHz versions of the chip. This has been followed recently by the release of a 450 MHz K6-2. The 266 & 300 MHz chips are now out of production although there are still 300 MHz chips available at many suppliers. Super Socket 7A processor is only as good as the motherboard that it runs in. To gain the full benefit of the AMD K6-2, there had to be a new generation of motherboards on the Socket 7 platform. This was dubbed Super Socket 7 and incorporated features such as support for 75,83,95 and 100 MHz bus speeds. This allowed the K6-2 to run on a 100 Mhz front side bus and to thus gain the performance benefits this brings. The Super Socket 7 platform though is not perfect and users may encounter some compatability problems especially in the area of AGP display cards. This is an area the user should exercise discretion when buying as a mismatch between motherboard and display card will cause stability problems.
This aside the K6-2 offers the budget PC buyer a good choice other than Intel. To find out more, read on.
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Other AMD Processors at:
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